This document relates to information presentation.
The performance of a content provisioning system, such as an advertisement provision system, is influenced by a variety of factors, including for example targeting quality, page views by user per day, economic conditions, average ad campaign quality, advertiser budget constraints, and types of publishers in the network. To increase performance, providers of a content provisioning system may change one or more quality performance requirements, such as quality measures, bid requirements, etc. Such changes, however, are predicated on expected performance increases; the true effect of these changes are verified after they are implemented by measuring system performance over a performance monitoring period. If after a performance monitoring period the changes are determined to increase performance, the changes can be permanently implemented. However, if the changes are determined to unexpectedly decrease performance, they can be removed to restore the system performance to the pre-change levels.
Performance of a content provisioning system, however, also depends on traffic composition factors, i.e., the percentage of traffic directed to particular web sites, domains, an other identifiable publishing providers. These traffic composition factors can be independent of other performance metrics. For example, on any given day, the relative traffic between two different websites can vary significantly. Conversely, the performance of each web site may be highly dependent on the performance requirements of the content provisioning system. Thus, if the traffic composition factors of the content provisioning system before a performance monitoring period are different from during the performance monitoring period, the effects of the changes of the performance requirements may be highly influenced by the traffic composition change in the network. This traffic influence can make it very difficult to measure the true effect imparted by the changes in the performance requirements.